Chapter 15: Slack

Dominic's POV

At seven on Wednesday morning Ariella stood in my kitchen in her bakery apron and said she was walking to work.

"Alone," she said.

I had spent twenty years answering that word with a car.

The marks of my hand were still on her.

They showed pink on the backs of her thighs, below the hem of her dress.

She had asked for every one of them last night.

I remembered the sound she made on the fifteenth, and I put the coffee down so I wouldn't spill it.

"Say that again," I said.

"I'm walking, and I'm not calling you from the corner." She tied the apron strings behind her. "You get one text when I'm inside. One."

"Silvio has men on Orchard Street."

"Silvio wants me alive until Friday. He wants his audience." She looked up. "You told me you'd stop being the man who decides where I go."

"I said I'd try."

"Then try."

She was five feet nothing, with a smear of flour on her wrist.

I wanted to lock the elevator.

I wanted it so badly that my hand closed on the counter edge.

"Go," I said.

She stared.

"Go on. Before I change my mind."

She stood on her toes and kissed my jaw, and then she was gone.

I stood in the kitchen and listened to the elevator.

Then I went down to the lobby.

I did not follow her.

I sat in a chair by the window in the lobby of my own hotel.

I held a newspaper I couldn't read.

The doorman kept looking at me.

At the corner of the window I could see a slice of the street, and in it a slice of her, walking in her flat shoes with her curls bouncing.

She turned the corner and she was gone.

My phone buzzed.

From inside the bakery, she had typed: Don't you dare come over.

I put the phone face down on my knee.

It took everything I had.

Keep reading free with an account. Start She Left Her Cheating Fiancé, Then Met the Mafia Boss Who Wanted Her from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.